INDEPENDENT MEDIA | Drone Attacks Not The Feasible Solution Against ISIS in Syria by Dr. David Alpher

This week, the
Washington Post published a story about a new US plan to use lethal drone
strikes in Syria to destroy ISIS capabilities on the ground.

The desire to do
something – anything – to destroy the capabilities of a group so luridly
destructive is understandable, but our haste to show results will likely result
in a hollow victory at best.

Proponents of
lethal drone strikes argue they are an effective way of reducing operational
capabilities and that they make Americans safer.

Critics of the
program argue that the risk of civilian casualties is too high and constitutes
a human rights violation. They add that the secondary effect of radicalizing
bystanders outweighs any tactical successes.

I offer an
additional, simpler critique, based on 14 years of experience analyzing and
working with programs designed to reduce conflict, insurgency and violent
extremism worldwide: there’s no evidence that drone strikes work.

On the contrary,
ample evidence shows drone strikes have not made Americans safer or reduced the
overall level of terrorist capability. The strikes amount to little more than a
waste of life, political capital and resources.

The numbers on
drones

There are two
countries with a sustained history of lethal US drone strikes to draw on for
data: Yemen and Pakistan.

Drone strikes in
Yemen began with a single missile fired in 2002, paused for several years and
then resumed in 2009. Strikes began in Pakistan in 2004. I looked at the
University of Maryland’s Global Terrorism Database for numbers and trends of
attacks in both Yemen and Pakistan, and in The Long War Journal for numbers of
drone strikes.

The bad news
starts immediately. Pakistan made the top ten list for highest number of
terrorist attacks worldwide during the first year of strikes. Yemen made the
list in 2010, a year after they restarted. Both countries have stayed on that
list ever since.

With the
exception of a slight decrease in Pakistan in 2014, the number of terrorist
attacks against American targets within both Yemen and Pakistan went up, not
down, since drone strikes began.

Domestic think
tanks like the RAND Corporation and even conservative research centers like the
staunchly pro-drone Heritage Foundation report that the number of threats
against the US has also increased over the past few years. There hasn’t been a
successful attack on US soil for some time, true. But the credit for that goes
to efforts that blocked plans from being carried out, not to drones that were
supposed to stop the plans from getting created in the first place.

In Yemen, not
only did overall numbers of attacks increase each year, but the number of
attacks by the al-Qaeda affiliates the US primarily targets kept increasing as
well.

If we take a
narrow enough view in Pakistan, it can look like there are successes. Attacks
by al-Qaeda are almost nonexistent in Pakistan these days, but the overall
number of attacks by all actors has increased – focusing on one group alone is
obviously asking the wrong question.

Despite the
assertion by Georgetown’s foreign affairs expert Daniel Byman that the senior
leaders killed by drones are not easily replaced, the number of “number two
al-Qaeda leaders” killed since 2001 is so high that even the satirical
publication The Onion started making fun of it as a metric back in 2006. CNN’s
announcement of “top leader” Nasir al-Wuhayshi’s assassination in Yemen this
past June reported his death and his replacement’s name in the same article.

Why airstrikes
won’t do it

The impossibility
of winning a war through airstrikes alone is taken as fact within the military.

During my own
time in the infantry, our drill sergeants considered it a truism that “the
infantry will never be out of a job because you can bomb all you want, but
someone still has to go root them out and sit on it.”

Unless the
United States is willing to put a large number of its own boots on the ground
to back up the airstrikes and hold the territory, those troops would need to be
local. Where would the US find local troops?

In Syria, the
only forces available belong to Bashir al-Assad, a despot seemingly intent on
using them to eradicate his own population. The US-supported militias in Syria
are far smaller than the US expected for its investment and performing vastly
worse than was hoped for.

Iraq does have
the military capability, but we are choosing not to launch this new drone
program there.

In both Syria
and Iraq, we face an even more fundamental problem. Lacking a cohesive,
articulate political strategy for governance and post-ISIS reconstruction, no
military solution can produce the results we’re looking for. Sean Naylor
reported in Foreign Policy this June that ISIS is recruiting more new members
than we kill.

We have a slight
advantage in that unlike the cellular, decentralized al-Qaeda, ISIS has carved
out territory that it holds and intends to keep. This provides a stationary
target on which to drop the proverbial hammer, but ISIS is drawing in fighters
in great numbers from around the world. Without blocking that “supply side,”
killing leadership within ISIS-controlled areas alone makes little sense – that
isn’t where the replacements are coming from.

Civilian
casualties of US drone strikes have decreased over time, largely by making a
shift and carrying out strikes only away from populated centers. The nature of
al-Qaeda targets allowed us to do that, but ISIS' command and control is
located in urban areas, where the idea of “surgical strikes” is pure fiction.
Although the targeting systems on our missiles are extremely precise, the blast
radius (between 15-20 meters for Hellfire missiles) is not.

Nowhere could I
find a way of crunching the numbers so the drone strikes worked. The program
thus far has resulted in a great deal of blood and money spent with nothing to
show for it. Lacking the political strategy, more of the same in Syria promises
no better.

David Alpher,
PhD, has spent the past fourteen years applying conflict resolution theory and
methodology to practical international development work in fragile and unstable
areas. He has twice led field programs in Anbar Province, Iraq; first working
to reduce the involvement of youth in the insurgency in 2007 and 08, and then
working to peacefully reintegrate Internally Displaced People in the Ramadi
district in 2010. In addition he has worked with track two dialogues between
conflicting parties in Israel/Palestine, conducted conflict and development
assessments in Nepal and Ethiopia, and helped facilitate inter-religious
dialogues in the US. Dr. Alpher completed his PhD from the School of Conflict
Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University in 2011.